Religion booknotes

...They also publish some serious, but popularly accessible, works which treat various aspects of the Franciscan charism...

...Father Norbert had the very good idea of combing through the writings (using the lives only in an ancillary fashion) to see if he could construct a systematic and coherent picture of the Christ of Saint Francis...

...The pictorial decoration of that property and what anthropologists call a "material culture" followed...

...In dialogue with, and commenting upon, the works of such noted scholars as Robin Lane Fox, Peter Brown, Patricia Cox, Elizabeth Clark, and others, Francis has written an illuminating work...

...ity of them...

...It is also interesting that Francis uses the verb administrare to speak both of the administration of the Eucharist (again, Eucharist is a word he never uses...

...James Francis points out, in a very well-written and closely argued work, that the second-century Roman Empire was the highpoint of the pagan ascetical Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second Century Pagan World, by James A. Francis Pennsylvania State University Press, $32.50, 222 pp...

...For decades, the Franciscan Institute (address: c/o Saint Bonaventure University, Saint Bonaventure, NY 14778, for a catalog and ordering information) has produced critical editions of the writings of medieval Franciscans such as William of Occam...

...Chapters 10 through 13 discuss the attraction of women to the Christian religio and their leadership roles in both heterodox movements (like Montanism) and in mainstream Christian communities...

...Curiously, however, he dwells on twelfth-century Romanesque in France instead of what I would have looked at: the Italo-Byzantine tradition of Italy, which is what Francis would have been most familiar with...

...Father Norbert's study of the Christol-ogy of Francis would fit into the category of a book solidly built on careful research but aimed at a general audience...

...A final reason why the subject is interesting, even if our author only touches on it in passing, has to do with the claims of certain biblical scholars that there is a parallel to be found between the life of Jesus and that of some of the wandering Cynic philosophers...

...The main arguments tendered to exclude women from leadership roles were rooted in the biblical doctrine of the subordination of women to men and the fact that God did not choose a woman to baptize Jesus, etc...

...Not everyone will be enamored of Kraemer's theoretical model of interpretation (borrowed from the anthropologist Mary Douglas) nor convinced in every instance of how she reads the evidence...

...There are so many useful things in this lovingly written book that the writings of Francis, which on the surface seem flat and conventional, need to be read in a new light...

...In his concluding chapter, Francis notes that the rise of Christian monasticism in the fourth century can be seen as an institutionalization of the anarchic impulses brought forth from a following of the Gospels' "hard sayings...

...This is, of course, a lot of territory to cover but, as her ample bibliography indicates, Professor Kraemer has read an enormous amount, synthesized it well, and, blessedly, writes a crisp, jargon-free prose...

...3) the preaching of priests in church...

...For others, like some devotees of Cynic philosophy, it was a vehicle for both social criticism and a "deconstruction" of the prevailing mores of a society...

...200 Finney concedes...

...Is it too far off the mark to suggest that Francis, who was not a conventionally learned man (he described himself as idiota-unlettered) heard the word of God, not through Bible reading, but through close attention to the liturgical and homiletical life of the church...

...It is impossible to even summarize the evidence that she studies but some of her conclusions are worth noting...

...Equally, women seem to have had leadership roles in diaspora synagogues, but it is not clear if they were models for such roles in the early Christian ecclesiae or vice versa...

...Norbert's book seeks out the various images and titles that Francis uses, sets them against the world of twelfth-century piety (especially as it comes from Bernard of Clairvaux), and then studies in detail how Francis accepted and/or enlarged the images he uses...

...The writings of Francis are a melange of letters, liturgical texts, brief exhortations, rules for the religious life, glosses, and paraphrases of prayers...

...But it is hard to think of a more useful work as a survey of the evidence-enhanced by very full notes, a good index, and a bibliography for further reading...

...The Franciscan Institute, $25,253 pp...

...Francis does not hesitate to say that this view, expressed by Marcus Aurelius, not only contributed to the severe persecutions of the third century but was a philosophical worldview that lent itself to a totalitarian view of politics...

...It took on the added sense of a philosophy of life which prized moderation, withdrawal from the competitive world, a dietary regime, frugality in style of life, and a spirit of detachment...

...Toward what end...

...Further, while we know that women baptized and taught in the early church, we are still not clear about their precise leadership roles nor the reasons why, in the post-Constantinian world, they were more restricted in their place(s) in the church...

...The conventional wisdom explaining this absence as well as the subsequent rise of art is that the Christians inherited the tradition coming from Judaism that was hostile to art in theory and practice...

...I would also like to pay tribute to the fine prose style of the author...

...Most come, very likely, from the last years of his life...

...Like Cistercian Publications and the Institute of Carmelite Studies, the Franciscan Institute publishes works (inexpensively...

...By contrast, the wandering Cynics, with their show of alleged miraculous powers, their disdain for conventional living, and their propensity to stir up people against social norms, were deviants worthy of the most strenuous condemnation...

...Some may find his final pages daunting, peppered as they are with lines in Italian, French, Latin, German, and Greek (he does not translate his epigraphical citations, which led me to my dictionary more than once...

...It was from that position that some polemicized against, for instance, the Christians who were seen as irrational, undermining Roman pietas, and disturbers of the social order...

...He denies that the "anti-art" polemics in the early patristic writings should be seen as the basis for an aniconic theology...

...I have read and thought about the early writings of and about Francis for a long time, but books like this help me to reach deeper into the life of the Poverello and for that I am grateful...

...Once they had a "culture," then they could, as a culture, acquire property...

...about the underpinnings of the anti-Christian polemics coming from a writer like Celsus at the end of the second century...

...Francis devotes separate chapters to a close reading of the works of Marcus Aurelius, Lucian, Apollonius of Tyana, and Celsus...

...he always refers to the "body and blood of the Lord") and the word of God to the faithful...

...Only later, in the Middle Ages, does this become a key weapon in the arsenal against women's ministry...

...He throws light on asceticism, the development of the monastic charism, and one matrix out of which Christianity was given shape...

...Francis was more liturgically sophisticated than we would think at first glance...

...He had the further good idea of contextualizing that search in terms of the regnant art of the time...

...First, there seems not to have been any difficulty with women exercising priestly and leadership functions in the ancient pagan world...

...Unlike Francis who largely sticks to the second century, Kraemer provides us with a tour de horizon of women's ministry from the ancient Greeks through the patristic period...

...He is a pleasure to read, even when the material at hand is rough going...

...For some, like the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, it was a means toward a rational life...

...And does it follow that that is probably the way most people heard the word in those days...

...movement...

...that this absence is best explained because of prejudice against art Finney denies...

...Furthermore, he makes the very intelligent (and valuable) observation that one reason why Christianity spread is because it was able to take over elements of the regnant culture and put it to its own uses (which is the way, for instance, he "reads" the first products of Christian art...

...Her Share of the Blessings was first published in 1992...

...But given his thoroughness and his abundant bibliographies, this is a treasure trove for further explorations...

...One was the conviction that a certain sensible askesis led to a balanced and rational life which led to an appreciation of traditional moral norms and social stability...

...which mine the legacy of a given religious tradition...

...It has taken me a long time to work my way through this dense volume but I must say the effort was well worth it...

...art before a.d...

...Attention is paid both to women's participation in goddess worship (Artemis, Hera, Demeter) and to the worship of male gods like Adonis Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World, by Ross Shepard Kraemer Oxford University Press, $10.95,275 pp...

...This culture jelled, as it were, in the period of the Roman Tetrarchy, which is to say, circa a.d...

...It is the burden of Finney's immensely learned book to show that the conventional wisdom is not right...

...Meanwhile, conservative Christians wanted to harmonize the "hard sayings" by spiritualizing them...

...Finney sets out his argument against the standard consensus in microscopic detail...

...I liked this book very much...

...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology and chairs the department at the University of Notre Dame...

...Pressures from below by the uneducated masses eroded the authority of the aniconic tradition, and the introduction of pictorial art was a compromise of the essential aniconic tradition of early Christianity...

...His thesis is that it took a certain period for Christians to understand themselves as a separate culture since they had no long tradition, no separate language or costume, nor were they ethnically separate...

...He argues that there was a two-tiered polemic going on in these works...

...Celsus in his True Doctrine (which we know only through citations from his third-century antagonist, Origen), in fact, vilified Jesus for being just that kind of rabble-rouser...

...2) the words of liturgical texts...

...rather, they should be seen as an antipagan polemic...

...we now have an inexpensive soft-cover version of a very good book...

...That there is no identifiable Christian The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art, by Paul Corby Finney Oxford University Press, $45,319 pp...

...However, Kraemer concludes, "In antiquity, no one argues that women cannot be priests because the priest represents Christ in the congregations and Christ came, necessarily, in the form of a male...

...On close analysis, the "words of God" seem to mean three things: (1) the words of eucharistic institution...

...Let me cite one specific example...

...Lucian's Death of Peregrinus, for example, sketched the "character type" of such a charlatan (Peregrinus is linked to the Christian movement) in order to mount a vicious polemic against them...

...and Dionysius, as well as Roman matronal rites and such syncretist cults as that of Isis...

...Chapters 8 and 9 study women in the rabbinical tradition and their leadership roles in the synagogues of the diaspora...

...The first seven chapters focus on Greco-Roman religion...

...In the final section, Finney examines in fine detail the first examples of Christian art, both in terms of style and iconography...

...A close look at that movement tells us a good deal about a number of very interesting issues: why the Christians were persecuted...

...There is no Christian art which can be dated before a.d...

...Norbert notes that Francis never uses the word "Bible" or "sacred Scripture" but refers to "word of God" or "words of God" or "written words...

...It is almost impossible to date the majorThe Teacher of His Heart: Jesus Christ in the Thought and Writings of Saint Francis, by Norbert Nguyen-Van-Khnh, O.F.M...

...This close analysis yields not only the range of Christological images used by Francis but some surprising insights into his religious worldview...

...and as a matrix for understanding the phenomenon of monasticism which is basically a late third-century movement flowering in the fourth...